And people don’t have the money anymore.

The joke of it is that these games don't even bother targeting "retail" players anymore. They're all hunting for the Whale Player - the individuals who will spend upwards of five or six figures on a game's loot boxes and other gimmicks.

The gaming industry is going to crash

I don't know what a "crash" looks like at this point. When your very model is "Free 2 Play" and your primary revenue stream is this tiny minority of players, what are we expecting the change? A bunch of these players aren't even in the US. They're gamers in ultra-wealthy Emirates states or failkids from Korea and Japan, with credit cards that have no real upper limit. And if they fail... so what? These are clones of clones. Reskinned copies of games that never had much of a production budget to begin with.

Or they're subscription based games that generate revenue off people who have simply forgotten to cancel their accounts. The Gym Membership enterprise model, where you're just collecting $15/mo from thousands upon thousands of people who got suckered in during the hype cycle and forgot they were getting billed.

Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such

This is where I think we might genuinely see a ceiling. If the supply of semiconductors ever hits a serious crunch, you're going to see the price of high end cards and consoles go well beyond the reach of retail gamers. And then we really will all be stuck on Stardew Valley, because that's the high line of computer graphics we can support.

But the idea that people will stop turning out new titles (or clones of clones of archaic titles) seems dubious. We're never going to have a cartridge graveyard. And we're never going to run out of three-person teams of novel developers pushing the next generation of Cult of the Lamb or Slay the Spire or Deep Rock Galactic.

I would love to try making a game. Even games that I love to play still have a few minor things here and there that I wish were different. If I made the game myself, I could just change it myself and make it as close to perfect as I'm humanly able. Engines like Godot and similar make it so easy to do these days.

But the competition is extremely fierce. There are so many games on Steam that the chances of "making it" and being the next Hades or similar are just not that good. I'm clearly not the only one with a dream like this. That and the fact that making a game is a ton of work. Graphics, audio, gameplay, balancing, marketing, social media🤮, etc.

If I'm in the position someday where I don't need to turn a profit from it, then I may do it anyway, but I really feel bad for all the people who are trying to pursue their dream and yet may never make it there. We're in a golden age for the players, but for the creators, it's very difficult, to say the least.

Yeah, the gaming crash is imo, already underway.

Sooo many huge, recent, AAA or even "AAAA" basically catastrophic failures, so many games that are just gacha mtx'ing the fuck out of people...

And people don't have the money anymore.

The gaming industry is going to crash, but that won't actually really hurt gaming in general, imo, it will refocus onto smaller and medium sized teams, who focus on gameplay, style, actually competent stories and writing, anybody or team who can make something good without even needing a publisher.

Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such, but I think its gonna look a lot more like the 90s / early 00s pc gaming market, basically, wild fucking west.

That's not even a lot of money, and it at least creates a small barrier of entry. And there's still a lot of crap in Steam.

I see a lot if indies talking about their game development on other platforms, so hopefully by the time they list they already have an audience and can handle the fee.

But if a game is just low effort shovelware they deserve to lose it.

And yet I don’t think we’re headed for another crash similar to the 80’s one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there’s multiple ways of curating, sorting, and suffering the best and most popular ones.

The '80s crash was the result of physical hardware sitting unsold on shelves, such that retailers no longer wanted to keep them in stock anymore.

By contrast, the '20 deluge of slop isn't taking up inventory space. It's taking up marketing bandwidth. You're not going to dig a big pit and shovel in all the Ataris nobody wants to buy. But you might hit a point of saturation such that nobody can hear about the next BG3, because every media channel is inundated with ads for Mobile Command Wizard Fortress Nuclear Fantasy Final Ninja War Strikers.

I'm already seeing this in the mobile space. Finding a mobile game that isn't dog shit is virtually impossible.

I am not a programmer, but I guarantee I could gobble together enough free or paid assets to technically qualify as a game and have it "released on Steam". That's not a high bar.

And yet, I don't think we're headed for another crash similar to the 80's one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there's multiple ways of curating, sorting, and showcasing the best and most popular ones.

But I do think the onus is on consumers to use these tools and shop smart (and patiently, if they want the best deals), especially in this economy...

Uh, yep, a lot of people who think they are game devs are actually morons, and/or just trying to be able to say 'I have a game that is listed on Steam'.

Yep.

Very cool to see given all the things going on with the other companies these days.

added to your Steam wallet

Does this mean it's just store credit? Even if it isn't I bet this would motivate a lot of people to buy another game with these funds covering part of it, and the supply of games is infinite so Steam isn't out anything.

Probably easier to automate this than processing a bunch of price adjustment support tickets

Why? They gain more users loyalty (and money) by doing the morally right thing.

In the long term, they win, by a lot.

I had misread, yeah

They gave the user the lower price

The simple things make us customers for life. Hail Gaben!

I'm playing my part! I switched to Arch btw

The year of the Linux desktop.

Wooooooo!!,

Important to note that this is a 1 percentage point increase. Linux went from 1.8% of steam users to 2.8%. A 55.6% relative increase.

It's the same but with a few extra options at the bottom of search.... Who cares.

Two words, Steam Deck. (I have one and the update is still hanky because it just loads a dam webpage but better on the 7" screen.)

eGPU enclosure?

And I am clearly stating my objection: A payment processor doesn't need to know what I have bought.
Them knowing:

• Whom I have paid to
• The category of payment (products/ services/ donation etc.) for tax calculation purposes

is more than enough